Someone Get Columbus a Better Publicist

His Reputation Hasn’t Been This Bad Since the 1490s—and We Have the Textbooks To Prove It.

During my three years as a teacher at low-income schools in Washington, D.C., my students read about Sojourner Truth, Abraham Lincoln, César Chávez, and other famous Americans. But we never studied Christopher Columbus. The first school where I worked did not observe the holiday, and the second treated it as a parent-teacher conference day. So much for understanding the namesake of the District of Columbia.

For most of American history, right back to the first Columbus Day celebration in New York in 1792, neglecting Columbus would have been unthinkable. My father …